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MrDrDrtoday at 10:31 AM1 replyview on HN

I like this distinction, but it would then seem the only 'invention' would be the axioms of your mathematics. There exists numbers (natural, imaginary...), there exist shapes (a point, a line...). All the work from that point on could be 'discovered'. I agree that I don't see LLMs inventing in this way. But again, it raised the question - what are our brains doing when we 'invent' something?


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strgcmctoday at 2:12 PM

Well, take any invention you like, and let's break it down.

Somebody at some point, "invented" the idea that the earth was round. Before that, the obvious "just look around you" answer would've been, duh of course the ground is flat. But we know the earth has always been round, even if humans couldn't appreciate it for hundreds of thousands of years (I don't count the pre-history before homo sapiens). So we "invented" some fields of science and the mental models / abstractions that allowed us to conceptualize what a round earth could mean and how to measure it, but we didn't invent the roundness itself -- that was always reality, and we just lacked both the thoughts and the tools to conceptualize it (until later).

Now you might say, well that is a category of "simple" physical observations. The earth is naturally round all the time and doesn't take any extra human effort to make it so (it took some effort to imagine that it could be and to find ways to measure/prove it). But what about say -- semiconductors, NVIDIA GPUs, that sort of thing? It's not like semiconductors grow on trees and we just need to find them and learn how to consume/use them... isn't that a better example of "true invention"?

Sure, I could see that. But I guess my POV would be that, the invention of the latest AI chip, or the first semiconductor, or the first vacuum tube, or whatever came before, all laddered largely incrementally on "discoveries" that were then cleverly tweaked or reapplied, so that what appears to be "true invention" is usually/more-often just another chain in a long chain of "discoveries" that led up to it. I grant you that some of what appears in hindsight to be continuous progress, really is built on small discontinuous "leaps", but I don't think that breaks the argument (strengthens it in fact, IMO). You wouldn't have semiconductors today, unless Faraday (or somebody like him) discovered that silver sulfide resistance decreases with heat, and that is more like one of those physical properties that reality has always had (much like, earth was always round, we just didn't know it at first).

So in that sense, I feel this becomes almost like an "evolution vs intelligent design" debate -- some people look at the complexity and miracle that is the human eye or the human brain, and they insist there must have been an intelligent designer, because surely no random chaotic biological process could have produced something so wonderful... And yet, I think the scientific evidence largely shows that, indeed that is what happened, just random chance + evolutionary-pressure was all you really need (plus billions of years). So if you can accept that analogical framing for a minute, then I would posit that "invention"-adherents are really making something like an intelligent design argument, vs "discovery"-adherents are saying that evolution (in an artificial sense, with the artificial selection pressures of scientific research, of capitalism, etc., and compressed into centuries or decades, not millions or billions of years) is sufficient to derive miraculous-seeming results. The little discontinuous leaps along the way, are kind of like the random mutations of genes that happen to confer an advantage -- maybe we can say that we are more intentional about seeking those leaps out, or maybe we are just right-place/right-time lucky (e.g. thinking about penicillin and the random petri dish left out).

Perhaps once (or if) there is the sort of leap that breaks us out from a Type I to a Type II+ Kardashev civilization, maybe then I would grant you something needed to be "invented" that couldn't be based on a line of "discoveries". Or maybe not, maybe it will just be another semi-random discovery.